July 2004

"You may not know his name," the New York Times wrote four years ago, "but you have probably enjoyed the public spaces he has created." He is Ken Smith, "the Elvis Costello of landscape architecture." "Perhaps," the Times continues, "you sat on an Art Deco bench and admired the Islamic geometric patterns of the paving stones at Malcolm X Plaza in Harlem or walked through the Glowing Topiary Garden he and Jim Conti, a lighting designer, installed three years ago at Liberty Plaza for the winter solstice. If you've been to Toronto, you may have walked through his idiosyncratic Village of Yorkville Park, with its 700-pound rock and miniforests and the rain curtain that freezes into icicles in winter."Smith, we read, has a "Seussian mind," which means that he freely combines glass elevators with bamboo gardens – moving, earthless landscapes; horticultural Cubism – and he adds "glacial hummocks, grasslands, [and] honey locusts," even while opening up space for ice skating. And so on. But what interests me here are Smith's so-called Dumpster Gardens, where you take a dumpster – or skip, if you're British – and grow a garden in it. Portable landscapes.In 2003, Smith installed three such Dumpster Gardens at Ohio State University –

– as these photographs attest. "Each of the three Dumpsters houses different plant life," Ohio State University's student newspaper tells us. "One contains a fragment of lawn and a second has juniper shrubbery and river birch. The third stands in front of Ohio State President Karen A. Holbrook's office with a bed of scarlet (celosia) and gray (artemisia) flowers. (...) Each of the Dumpsters is three feet deep and 20 feet long. The bottom is covered with gravel to allow for drainage and the rest is filled with planting soil."But Smith's dumpsters are not doomed to spend the rest of their days in the empty, mausolean fate of decorating university campuses; indeed, returning to the New York Times: "Dumpsters would also be a great way to enliven traffic medians, Mr. Smith said. 'You could grow corn, or have a portable meadow of Queen Anne's lace and juniper,' he suggested."Of course, you could also link them all together into a walled labyrinth, a postmodern hedge maze that twists and meanders through the city; you could grow hybrid flowers and Aspen trees, poisonous fungi and ergotic growths, in others, a kind of dumpsterized botanical taxonomy; you could tow gardens all over the country, even, driving every mile of the US highway system (and terrestrially out-performing Robert Smithson in the process); you could ship the things to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where they'd be permanently anchored, forming tax havens, utopian atolls, a new Earth; or, better yet, you could skip the dumpsters outright and use enormous wicker baskets: plant amazing and weird asymmetrical gardens in each, then attach them to hot-air balloons – bulletproof, Artificially Intelligent hot-air balloons. Set them loose in the sky. Aerobiology.

Gardens drift slowly above your head on trade winds, trailing creeper vines; a jellyfish, made of kudzu, flying through the stratosphere. New weed species auto-hybridize, evolving super-seeds, and they re-invade the earth from above. Literal new levels of biological warfare. Hugo Award-winning novels are written, documenting the vegetative horrors. One of the balloons then crashes in the forests of Papua New Guinea and, instead of a cargo cult, you find a cult of landscapes-that-fall-out-of-the-sky. Gardens in a space capsule. They re-enter Earth's atmosphere and crash outside London 5000 years from now. Ken Smith is there to greet it – turns out it was his idea in the first place... In any case, Smith also has a book. More info on some of his other projects here and here and here.

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Hi, I just wanted to say that Israel is breaking the World Law, and America is on there side! Thats becuase there all Jews in America! America is the axis of Evil! They have no evidence over Iran and Syria, they just want to start on them next! Jews got the Christians now they want the Muslims!

Hi, I just wanted to say that, by your reckoning, I and everyone in my family is an evil Jew - thanks! I appreciate the insight, and am glad to engage in productive dialogue with you - and, by your comment, I reckon that you're an illiterate blog-spamming prick.

Thanks for finding BLDGBLOG, and for your astute analysis. I can't wait to see what other blogs you've spammed.

My previous comment, incidentally, is not meant to be some quick-witted encapsulation of BLDGBLOG's philosophy toward territorial claims in the Middle East, but simply to serve as a reply, in obviously ridiculous terms, to an equally and obviously ridiculous comment-spam that is so badly written - not to mention deliberately insulting - that neither agreement nor refutation seem the appropriate strategy.

In other words, if you're comfortable being semi-illiterate and historically misinformed - and you think using a robotic blog-spamming program to get your point across is a good idea - then I really don't think your argument will get you very far. If, on the other hand, you want to discuss an increasingly horrific and bewilderingly multi-faceted geopolitical situation, then come prepared with the rhetorical ability, the evidence, and the conversational patience to get your point across.

And, of course, if you think BLDGBLOG is written by an evil Jew - because everyone in the United States is an evil Jew - then... why on earth are reading the thing in the first place?

Meanwhile, as evidence of my own rhetorical patience, let me add that all blog-spammers are complete pieces of shit - and the robo-program that left the above comment is no exception.

Hello Geoff, Dumpster Gardens was one of your most interesting (and funny) posts yet! I'd hope that most readers of BLDGBLOG can make up their own minds about the Middle-East conflict(s) and will ignore the spammer. Karen

I actually was a student in the Landscape Architecture program at Ohio State during Ken's stay. While I think the transformation is ideal, for many reasons, in extreme urban areas, the "Oval", OSU's vast campus green which housed the dumpsters rendered them (IMHO) unnecessary and out of place. The premise of the project was never completely understood by the student body outside of the LA program and not well received.

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BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.